Wednesday, November 27, 2019

Eric Ip Comments on the Hong Kong Highspeed Railway Station Judicial Review Decision (Public Law)

"Hong Kong - Mainland Chinese Enclave in Highspeed Railway Station held Constitutional, Leung Chung Hang Sixtus v President of the Legislative Council [2019] 1 HKLRD 292" 
First Published 2019
Abstract: A parcel of land in the heart of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region has been ceded to mainland China in all but name under the Guangzhou-Shenzhen-Hong Kong Express Rail Link (Co-location) Ordinance (Cap.632), becoming the first mainland enclave, known as the "Mainland Port Area," inside Hong Kong in which the full force of socialist criminal and national security law will apply to the exclusion of the Special Administrative Region's common law system for all practical purposes. This Case Comment focuses on the Court of First Instance's judgment in Leung Chung Hang Sixtus v President of the Legislative Council [2019] 1 HKLRD 292 that the Ordinance and the Mainland Port Area it set up are constitutional. This Comment exposes several logical shortcomings in the judgment, including its argument from silence that the Basic Law does not intend to prohibit the Mainland Port Area, which can equally be used to argue that the Basic Law does not intend to allow the same. It gives due credit to the Court in upholding a common law approach in constitutional and statutory interpretation. And it argues that, paradoxically, in reviewing the Mainland Port Area's constitutionality, the Court has tacitly affirmed that the Hong Kong Judiciary necessarily retains a kind of constitutional jurisdiction over the Area that had not been ousted by the Ordinance.

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